Indexing files
Seventeen months ago, fishbowl initiated a thread about Filesystem sacrilege:
I no longer want to know where my files are stored. I no longer care. I have hordes of directories on my various computers called stuff, downloads and documents, and the effort that it would take to organise them into a proper hierarchy is just not worth it. The hierarchical filesystem is a really wonderful thing for programmers and websites, but it just doesn't cut it for personal use.
Then DECAFBAD got it, passed it to Jon Udell, and it was there that I saw it.It made sense, to have files indexed according to multiple categories, distinguished by keywords instead of rigid static folders. The emphasis, perhaps, was on finding things, on being able to reestablish a conversation that had been truncated, to be able to read again darting from idea to idea, without necessarily making sense.
Our brain works that way: we take initial ideas based on experience, and build on top of those. A neural network would also work that way: given a few inputs, it would attempt to recreate what it stores.
It has been already seventeen months since the fishbowl made its plea. Oh, where is our magic filing system?
Comments
Well, it takes a long time to turn around a ship as big as an operating-system.
There's the WinFS thing in Longhorn that promises to go vaguely in this direction, and Apple have always been rumoured to be doing something interesting with their filesystem, after hiring the guy who did the FS for BeOS. And no doubt Linux will eventually follow whichever model looks the most interesting.
Posted by: Charles Miller | June 22, 2004 5:57 PM